SEATTLE — In 2012, actress Jada Pinkett-Smith, introduced by her daughter Willow Smith, advocated against human trafficking and slavery and attested her compassion in front of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in Atlanta, Georgia. She announced her mission to initiate a movement whose goal was to raise awareness and create action against human trafficking and slavery in the United States.
During the hearing, Jada Pinkett-Smith requested an extension of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, as it sources the funds needed to contest trafficking and aid trafficking victims. The act also developed a task force lead by former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, that organized federal agencies to apply and enforce policies against human trafficking and slavery.
Along with meeting the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jada Pinkett-Smith worked beside the DON’T SELL BODIES Organization for further advocacy. The organization works toward reducing, and eventually ending, the misery of human trafficking. According the organization, 83 percent of victims of human trafficking in the U.S. were U.S.-born citizens.
DON’T SELL BODIES also addresses that every year, between 700,000 and 4 million women and children are targeted to be abducted for trafficking. These women and children are then forced to work in the sex trade, right in America.
It is by the voices of victims that Jada Pinkett-Smith advocates against human trafficking and slavery, in affiliation with a CNN Special Report titled “Children for Sale: The Fight to End Human Trafficking” (which aired back in 2012), where she focused on her still-emerging billion-dollar business.
She also has referenced that slavery, the “old monster, is still with us,” even 15 decades after the appointment of the Emancipation Proclamation — the act that liberated African-American slaves in the U.S. — in American legislation.
“We’ve always looked at human trafficking as being a problem over there, somewhere else, but it’s actually happening inside of our borders … in our own backyard.” As with human trafficking, slavery and other human injustices need to come to end, once and for all.
– Jalil Perry
Photo: Flickr